


Beginning

by dollsome



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-09-02 00:36:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16776097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollsome/pseuds/dollsome
Summary: At the very start of summer, before everyone goes their separate ways (except Buffy, who seemed very ready to be gone—and who can blame her?), Giles, Willow, and Xander are enlisted to help Jenny Calendar move into a new apartment.





	Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> I just rewatched the first few seasons of BtVS for the first time in years, and naturally that led to my heart being devoured by my old fave of an otp here yet again. "Maybe it won't hurt so much this time around!" I naively thought. "Maybe I just won't care!"
> 
> A ha ha ha, _nope_. I'm emo forever about it, friends.
> 
> This was originally a little 400-word drabble I wrote eleven (!!??) years ago. I meant to dust it off and post it here, so of course the story instead chose to grow by approximately 1,900 words. It meant more Giles and Jenny time in my poor weary heart, so I can't be too upset about it.
> 
> p.s. Dear Lipton, please don't sue me. I swear I love you! (Except for the part where I don't! I love Twinings! And Bigelow! Just not you!! Your iced tea is okay??)

At the very start of summer, before everyone goes their separate ways (except Buffy, who seemed very ready to be gone—and who can blame her?), Giles, Willow, and Xander are enlisted to help Jenny Calendar move into a new apartment. 

First, Willow volunteers. Of course she does.

“You do know you can’t get extra credit during the summer, right, Will?” Xander says as the two of them step into the library, carrying boxes full of old locker contents. Giles is packing up the books he’s picked out for a bit of light summer reading. He makes sure to step around the broken glass and debris left over from the fight on the night of Spring Fling.

He greets the newcomers with, “Watch out for the ...”

“General destruction?” Xander finishes.

Giles glances around. “That about covers it.”

Willow, meanwhile, sticks to the original point. “I don’t do everything for good grades.”

“Sure you do, o nerdly one.”

“Fine, then this is extra credit for the soul! Ms. Calendar really appreciated it when I said I would help her move. She’s still kind of new here, and hasn’t had a lot of time to make non-online friends because of the whole, you know, all evil all the time in Sunnydale thing. Plus, grading.”

“Yeah, but do we really need a new member of the gang? Helping someone move implies permanent camaraderie. What’s next? Airport chauffeuring? Godparenting? I don’t think so. Do I look ready to be a godparent to you?”

“I think Ms. Calendar would be a great member of the gang. Giles, don’t you think Ms. Calendar would be a great member of the gang?”

“Mmphfffrgg,” says Giles.

“But come on, there’s something to be said for keeping numbers small. We’re already veering dangerously close to letting in Cordelia. And to that horrifying suggestion, may I just say that _barf_.”

“Ms. Calendar did stick around to fight with us during the whole almost-apocalypse. And she helped stop me from dying of My New Boyfriend’s An Internet Demon.”

“Well, yeah,” Xander says, unimpressed. “That.”

“ _And_ she got Giles to dance at Spring Fling. That’s got to be powerful enough magic to win her a spot in the gang for good.”

“How many times am I going to have to tell you never to speak of that again?” Giles asks impatiently.

Xander puts on a pondering frown, then declares, “At least infinity more times.”

“Splendid,” Giles mutters. He maintains that he was relief-drunk, what with Buffy coming back and the apocalypse being averted. At the time, dancing with the computer science teacher had seemed like a reasonable way to celebrate.

“Anyway,” Willow goes on, “so far it’s just me and Ms. Calendar, and we could really use someone with more mighty upper arm strength, and Buffy’s gone.”

“So you’re asking me? Pfft.”

“Hey, you could come!” Willow’s face brightens as she looks at Giles.

“So you’re asking Giles?” Xander says. “Pfft.”

“You could help us move stuff, right?” Willow persists. “You’ve got nothing going on! Um,” she adds hastily, “because Buffy’s gone and so you don’t have to do any Watching. Not because you never have anything going on.”

Giles decides to count ‘read a whole bunch about demons’ as something to do.

“As a matter of fact, I am rather booked up.” In the literal sense. “Besides, I doubt the first thing Ms. Calendar wants to do with her summer is remind herself of my existence.”

“I dunno,” Willow replies, smiling. “She seems to like you.”

Giles means to reply with an unimpressed scoff. Instead, he stammers out a string of nonsense syllables. It does nothing for his dignity.

Before Xander and Willow can offer their commentary on that, the library doors swing open.

It’s the woman herself. Ms. Calendar breezes in like she owns the (recently hellbeast-ravaged) place, sunglasses perched on her head like a makeshift tiara and wearing a short burgundy sundress that certainly isn’t remotely interesting. “I thought you might be here. We still on for Saturday, Willow?”

“We sure are. And Giles and Xander are going to help!”

“That’s not been decided,” Giles protests. His gentlemanly instincts, rusty though they are, balk at that. “Er, unless you’re in dire need of assistance. Then I suppose I might ... find the time.”

“Oh, it’s dire, all right.” Ms. Calendar puts her hands on her hips. Tilts her head. Is singularly annoying and not at all especially pretty today. “I need you, Rupert Giles.”

Giles crosses his arms in front of his chest and gives her his best skeptical stare. He’s had ample time to refine it lately.

“You have a truck, right?” she adds. She’s made fun of Giles’s car approximately three hundred and fifty times. A month.

“Oh yes,” he says, “fleets of them, in fact.”

She laughs.

It stays all day in his head like a good song. There’s no hope left for him after that.

* * *

The day of, he considers dressing down for once. There’s not much sense in wearing tweed while lugging boxes. But after briefly reviewing the less formal contents of his wardrobe, he decides against it. No need to mix things up. He wears tweed. She loses very confusing pieces of jewelry. There’s something to be said for an established pattern. He would have balked at such thinking when he was young. These days, he takes comfort in the thought of being predictable.

He makes sure to arrive ten minutes later than they’d planned so that Xander and Willow will be there already, distractions from any residual awkwardness regarding Spring Fling slow-dancing. At the last minute, he leaves his jacket in the car.

“Gee.” Ms. Calendar leans against the doorframe, looking better in jeans and a casual tee than anyone has any right to. “I bet I’m the only girl in Sunnydale whose moving crew adheres to a sweater vest dress code.”

“If the thought is too horrifying, I-I can always go.” He gestures back toward his car on the sidewalk. “I’m sure Xander and his unique brand of sartorial excellence will get the job done just fine.”

“Hey!” calls Xander from inside.

“I think your shirt looks cool,” comes Willow’s consoling voice. A remark meant for Xander, no doubt.

Ms. Calendar, meanwhile, pulls the door open wide. “Come on in, Rupert.” She gestures grandly. “Welcome to wonderland.”

“Dear lord.” He stares at the array of boxes and bags and random objects that haven’t found their way into either yet. It shouldn’t be possible for a studio apartment to hold so much, well, _stuff_. “I think the apocalypse might have been tidier.”

“If it’s too much for your delicate sensibilities, Jeeves, I totally understand. There’s the door—”

“No, no. Happy to be here.”

She flashes a smile at him. It makes him feel unaccountably at peace with his decision to come along today, a feeling that doesn’t quite fade even while loading the entire contents of the woman’s apartment into his car.

(“How many shoes do you _have_?”

“The exact number it takes to psychologically break you.”

“Clearly.”

“I planned ahead. I like to play the long game.”)

* * *

It’s only the two of them here in her new apartment—one bedroom, more space—standing in the clean bare kitchen as sunlight streams in through the half-open window. Music fills the silence left by Willow and Xander’s departure, pop hits pouring from the radio that Jenny made sure to unpack first. It’s nothing he recognizes, which is to be expected. While the kids were here, she shimmied along to it now and again, mouthing lyrics at random, but now that they’re alone she’s gone still.

It feels strangely personal being surrounded by dozens of unpacked boxes labeled in her loose, lovely handwriting. Here is her life, he thinks (stupidly), ready to be taken out and put back together again, and he is here standing with her. This is what it’s like to begin.  
  
“So, uh, can I get you anything?” she asks, her voice higher than usual. It occurs to him that perhaps she’s nervous. The idea is heartening. “Coffee, tea?”  
  
“Um, tea would be very nice,” he answers by default. “Thank you.”  
  
“Great!” She shuffles through the box labeled _Kitchen!!!_. Even as he mentally questions her dedication to exclamation points, he watches the way her hair falls around her face, escaping from a short ponytail. He wonders what it might be like to tuck her hair behind the curve of her ear. He wonders what it might be like to—  
  
“So,” she asks, friendly small talk, not facing him, “do you have any plans for the summer?”  
  
“I thought that perhaps I would—” He falls silent as she pulls out a box of Lipton tea. “Ah.”  
  
“What?” she asks. Her expression is only blank for a moment. Then it’s replaced by a wry, knowing smile that’s far lovelier than anything else he’s seen in recent memory.

That doesn’t mean so very much, he tells himself firmly. Most of his recent memories involve eldritch beasts and/or viscera and/or Principal Snyder.

“Oh, right,” she says. “You probably don’t do the whole Lipton thing, huh? I guess I get it. It probably doesn’t fly at tea with the queen.”  
  
It is one of those times when he wishes he weren’t so British. “What? No. No, it’s—it’s perfectly all right.”  
  
She smirks. “You sure?”  
  
“Quite,” he says. “I often, er, Lipton it up.”

It is not remotely convincing. Not to mention that it’s a verbal monstrosity on par with something spat out by Xander.  
  
For a long, excruciating moment, she scrutinizes him. He knows that she is teasing him, leaving him to suffer in her bright-eyed silence, and cannot bring himself to be remotely offended. What would have driven him mad at a staff meeting at the start of the year is strangely charming to him now. He supposes that must mean they’re friends. She’s his first one in a long while.  
  
“Okay, Snobby,” she finally relents, lifting her hands in graceful surrender. “If you say so. One Lipton tea, coming up.”  
  
And perhaps it’s the boldness of summer—of having survived certain doom, of Buffy having refused to cooperate even with death. Of having found this small, strange unanticipated happiness where he’d least expected it. A hellmouth in a high school, of all places.

In any case, she’s smiling at him now, and it’s very easy to forget about things like duty and destiny. Buffy is away, being a person instead of a chess piece. Maybe it’s about time that he did a bit of the same.

Feeling ridiculously brave, he says, “Of course, I suppose this means I’ll have to have you over someday. S— so that I might show you how to prepare a proper cup of tea.”  
  
Mercifully, she doesn’t leave the words to hang, awkward, in the air. Her smile brightens even more. “Okay, it’s a date.”

He can’t help but smile back.

“But only if there are finger sandwiches,” she throws in.

“I suspect in Sunnydale it’s best not to tempt fate there.”

She stares down at her hands, grimacing. “Right. Let’s stick to cookies.”

“Biscuits, you mean?” he says mildly.

“You’re lucky I talk to you,” she pronounces, turning away from him. He chuckles.

She can’t find the kettle and heats the water in the microwave, which was left by the previous tenant and looks like it could use a good scrub. The tea is weak and lukewarm and near-unparalleled in its repulsiveness. All of this is made suspiciously tolerable by the fact that, as she hands him the mug, her fingers brush his.

“I think this is gonna be good,” she murmurs while Giles winces his way through the atrocity masquerading as tea.

He watches her stare up at the ceiling, around the stretches of empty space. He thinks there’s something a little melancholy in her gaze. It’s funny: he’s never thought of her as the wistful sort. She’s far too much of a hurricane.

“A fresh start,” he ventures.

“Exactly.” She looks thoughtful for a moment longer, then comes back to herself (and him). She grins. “Hey. You’re my first guest.”

“Do you usually make your guests perform hard labor? I still maintain that that trunk was full of bricks, by the way.”

“Please. It was shoes.” After a beat, she adds, “Two, three bricks at the most.”

“Aha. I knew it.”

“You got me.”

They stare at each other, suddenly caught off guard. Giles is pulled inconveniently back to that night at the Bronze, dim lights and swaying teenagers, the not-unpleasant sensation of drowning in happy chatter and terrible music. How she’d clasped her hands behind his neck, gentle but sure.

“The point is,” she says quickly, killing the moment, “I made you tea. That means you’re my guest.”

She expects he’ll take the bait and insult the tea. He can tell.

Instead, he veers toward pleasantness. “Well then. Happy housewarming.”

“Thanks,” she says, looking both disoriented and appreciative. It’s a rather flattering combination on her. He feels a stab of accomplishment, and something else he thinks he’d better not name just yet.

She grabs a bottled water from the package on the kitchen counter—one of the few that Xander hadn’t guzzled down—and twists off the top. Once she’s come back to him, she taps it lightly against the mug.

“To new beginnings,” she says.

“New beginnings,” he echoes, liking the sound of it.

They drink in companionable silence. It is, he’s increasingly certain with every sip, the worst cup of tea he’s ever had. But damned if he’s ever enjoyed another one more.


End file.
